The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.

Federal courts have an important role to play in enforcing laws against powerful figures who defy them. But the options available to federal courts are simultaneously too limited, weak, and dangerous for us to rely on them to the exclusion of everything else.

Given the anti-democratic corporate form of all private and many public universities, appeals to “shared governance” cannot succeed in wresting power from the academy’s autocrats. Instead, American universities must be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism.

The current constitutional crisis offers a new picture of what legitimate government looks like: rule by the boss, where professional civil servants become at-will employees, the threat of prosecution is just another bargaining chip, and statutory, constitutional, and ethical restraints are treated as tokens in a sucker’s game.

Trump’s executive order is not merely unconstitutional. It is an effort to perpetrate the very evils that abolitionists and Republicans sought to eradicate from our constitutional order.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous affirmation of the TikTok Ban reveals a dangerous weakness in the First Amendment: its failure to protect against government repression that targets the economic infrastructure of speech, rather than speech itself — precisely the kind of repression that is likely to be a hallmark of the second Trump presidency.